Monday, 23 April 2012

90 per cent of Indians have an unscientific temper. The facts bear it out

After my article ‘The 90%’ was published in The Indian Express on April 4, I got a call from the Delhi correspondent of The Wall Street Journal asking me on what basis I had mentioned the figure 90 per cent when I said that 90 per cent Indians are fools. I replied that it was not a mathematical figure, what I meant was that an overwhelming number of Indians were fools. Therefore the figure might be 85 per cent, on the other hand it could be 95 per cent. Consider the following facts:

One,Tamilians are some of the finest and most intelligent among Indians. They have done the country proud in various fields — scientific research, mathematics, IT, medicine etc. In the US and Europe, the science and mathematics departments of many universities and institutes are full of Tamilian professors.

Yet Tamilians are some of the most superstitious people in India. This may sound like a paradox, but it is true, and this just shows that scientific and unscientific ideas can co-exist in the same head. When I went to Chennai to take oath as Chief Justice of Madras High Court in November 2004, I was told not to take oath in Rahukalam time. I asked what this Rahukalam was, and was told it was the inauspicious time according to astrology. Now, Rahukalam is all nonsense (as is all astrology), but over 90 per cent of Tamilians believe in it. To give an example, a very senior south Indian lawyer practising in the Supreme Court told me that his Tamilian clients tell him not to begin reading their briefs during Rahukalam time.

Two, most ministers and even many chief justices of high courts take oath at the “auspicious” time, as advised by their astrologer.

Three, judges of the Supreme Court are allotted houses in the Supreme Court Judges pool. One of such houses was 7, Tughlak Lane. Unfortunately some mishaps happened to some judges who occupied this house, and thereafter no judge would accept it, thinking it was inauspicious. Ultimately, the then Chief Justice of India wrote to the concerned authority to remove that house from the judges pool, which was done, and another house allotted to the pool.

Four, some years back it was announced in the media (which plays a prominent role in spreading superstitions) that Lord Ganesh was drinking milk. There was a rush of huge crowds in many cities in India to offer milk to idols of Lord Ganesh. Similarly, some years back a miracle chapati was announced. Many such “miracles” keep happening from time to time, and most people believe them.

Five, this is a “baba-bound” society. Consider the number of “godmen”, their huge following and huge properties they amass. The latest one claims to have a third eye, like Lord Shiva. It was published in a leading English newspaper (April 18) that he had told people in Raipur not to keep shivalingams at home for their welfare but to put them in temples. As a result, temples in Raipur were flooded with Shivalingams. He had also advised eating kheer, samosas, golgappas etc for various problems. And much of all this was lapped up by his followers, who have donated huge amounts to him.

Six, when I was a judge in the Allahabad High Court, it was announced that someone in Tamil Nadu had discovered a method of converting water into petrol. Some of my colleagues said that now we will get cheap petrol. I told them this was a fraud, because in science there is a principle that everything moves from a higher energy level to a lower energy level. Petrol is at a higher energy level, whereas water is at a lower energy level. Water (H2O) is really burnt hydrogen, it is like ash. You can convert wood into ash by burning it, but how can you convert ash into wood? And later it was found to be a fraud.

Seven, before finalising a marriage most parents consult astrologers, and it is only if the “kundali” matches that the proposal is finalised. The poor “mangalik” girl is often rejected for no fault of hers.

Eight, every day, a large number of TV channels show astrology and all kinds of superstition. The Broadcast Editors Association announced that they will stop all this shortly, but how can they? The members of these bodies are only employees, not owners of the channels. Their pay packages (sometimes going up to two or three crores per year) are often linked with the TRP rating. Their owners have given one simple instruction to them — keep the TRP rating high.The owners only want profits, profits depend on advertisement revenues, which in turn depends on viewership.

Unfortunately, the intellectual level of the middle classes (who are the main viewers) in India is very low. All they wish to see is the lives of filmstars, fashion parades (often with half-naked women), cricket (which is opium for the masses) and of course, astrology. And so this is dished out day after day to get high TRP ratings.

Nine, most Hindus are communal, and most Muslims are also communal. As I have repeatedly pointed out, they were not communal before 1857. Before 1857, Hindus used to celebrate Eid, and Muslims used to celebrate Holi and Diwali. Muslim rulers, like the nawab of Avadh, Tipu Sultan etc used to organise Ramlila, give grants to Hindu temples, etc. It was after suppressing the Mutiny that the British decided that the only way to control India was by divide and rule. Hence a deliberate policy was laid down by the British to generate hatred between Hindus and Muslims. All communal riots started after 1857. The English collector would secretly call the local panditji, give him money, and ask him to start speaking against Muslims, and he would also call the local Maulvi secretly and give him money to speak against Hindus. This poison was systematically spread year after year, decade after decade, until it culminated in the Partition of 1947 (see ‘History in the Service of Imperialism’, and my articles ‘What is India’ and other articles on justicekajtu.blogspot.in and the articles and the video on the website kgfindia.com). Even now, there are powerful vested interests promoting communal hatred. The truth is that 99 per cent people of all communities are good, but it will take a lot of time to remove the communal virus from our body politic. Today the situation is that whenever any bomb blasts take place, immediately Muslim individuals or groups are blamed for it.

Ten, social evils like honour killings, dowry deaths, female foeticide are still widely prevalent in India.

I have said all this not to demoralise Indians, but to point out to them the correct path to prosperity. It is only scientific thinking that can save us from the disaster to which we are headed.

India has a strong scientific heritage (see my article Sanskrit as a language of science ). It is only when we go back to the path shown by our great scientific ancestors, Aryabhatta, Brahmagupta, Sushrut, Charak, Ramanujan and Raman and spread scientific thinking widely that we can recover our former glory.

The writer, a former judge of the Supreme Court, is chairman of the Press CouncilPublished in The Indian Express

Your
Excellency’s recent visit to India and Ajmer Sharif has created a climate for
good relations between our two countries.

Your Excellency was very kind to
honour the appeal made by the bench of the Indian Supreme Court (consisting of
Justice Gyan Sudha Mishra and myself) for release of one Gopal Das, an Indian
who had been undergoing a life sentence in Pakistan, and had spent 27 years in
Pakistani jails. In our judgment we had quoted the famous Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed
Faiz:

“Qafas udaas hai yaaron saba se kuch to
kaho

Kaheen to behar-e-khuda
aaj zikr-e-yaar chale”

On Your Excellency’s
order Gopal Das was released and was sent back to India. I am very grateful for
Your Excellency’s kind gesture.

Now through this letter I am praying
to you for similar generosity in the case of one Sarabjit Singh, an Indian
national, who has been on death row in a Pakistani jail for over 20 years. I am
appealing to you to order release of Sarabjit Singh and his return to India as
a humanitarian gesture, exercising your power of pardon as the Pakistan
President. By doing so you will add to the excellent impression among Indians
created by your recent visit to Delhi and Ajmer Sharif, and improve ties
between our two countries.

You would be knowing that the Indian
Supreme Court recently granted bail to Dr. Khalil Chishty, for whose release I
have been campaigning for a long time. Release of Sarabjit Singh and sending
him back to India will add to the friendly atmosphere which has been created.

I will conclude by quoting Portia’s
speech in Shakespeare’s ‘Merchant of Venice’

Re:order of the
Hon’ble Allahabad High Court (Lucknow Bench) dated 10.4.2012
regarding movement of army troops.

I have perused the order of the Hon’ble Allahabad High Court in writ petition No 2685 dated
10.4.2012. In that order a direction has
been given to the Secretary, Home Affairs, and Secretary Information &
Broadcasting, Government of India and the Principal Secretary (Home) , Govt. of
U.P. to ensure that there is no reporting/ release of any news item by the
print as well as electronic media relating to the subject matter, namely the
movement of troops as contained in the accompanying annexures. (The news of
alleged troop movement towards Delhi published by Indian Express on
4.4.2012). In this connection, I am
of the opinion that regarding reporting of troop movement by the Media a
balanced approach has to be taken. On
the one hand freedom of the media is guaranteed as a fundamental right in
Article 19(1) (a) of the Constitution, on the other hand this right is subject
to reasonable restrictions in the public interest as mentioned in Article
19(2).

Now
coming specifically to the question of reporting of movement of troops , I am
of the opinion that reporting troop movement near the Indian border or during
war time should be prohibited as that
may aid the enemy and cause harm to our armed forces, by compromising national
security. However, in my opinion there
can be no general prohibition of reporting of all troop movements.

As regards the reporting of alleged troop
movement by the Indian Express, I am of
the opinion that without going into the
question whether the news reporting was factually correct or not,
there could not have been a valid prohibition of such reporting, because the
troop movement was not at the Indian
border or during war time. On the other
hand the allegation in the Indian Express report was that there was some
convention written or unwritten,
that troop movements towards Delhi
should not take place without notifying
and getting consent of the government, and it was alleged
that the troop movement in question took place without notifying the
government. The further allegation was that this caused panic among the civil
authorities, and the troop movement was abruptly stopped.

The Allahabad High Court order
was passed on a writ petition relating to the above publication in the Indian
Express. With great respect to the
High Court, I am of the opinion that the order of the High Court is not
correct. The Media has a fundamental right under Article 19(1) (a) of the Constitution to make
such publication, as it did not endanger national security.

I may add that the Indian Army is
not a colonial army, but the army of the Indian people who pay the taxes for
the entire defence budget. Hence the
people of India have a right to know about army affairs, except where that may
compromise national security. The media did an excellent job in exposing
the Adarsh and Sukhna scams in which
senior army officers were involved, and they were well within their right under
Article 19(1) (a) to do so.

The Indian Express is not a fly by night newspaper, but a responsible
one. They took 11 weeks to complete the
investigation of the reported troop investigation before deciding to publish
the report. Hence I do not see how they
can be faulted.

The Press Council of India will be challenging the order of the
Allahabad High Court in the Supreme
Court of India very shortly.

Monday, 9 April 2012

Someone told me “Justice
Katju, you say you wish to keep away from controversies, but why it that
controversies keep chasing you ?”

I replied that while it
is true that I wish to be uncontroversial, but at the same time I have a great
defect, and that is this: I cannot remain silent when I am seeing my country
going downhill. Even if others are deaf and dumb I am not. So I will speak out.
As Faiz said:

“Bol ki lab
azad hain tere

Bol zubaan ab tak teri hai”

In our Shastras it is
written:

“Satyam bruyat, priyam
bruyat, na bruyat satyam apriyam”

Which means “Speak the
truth, speak the pleasant, but do not speak the unpleasant truth”

I wish to rectify this. The
country’s situation today requires that we should say “Bruyat satyam apriyam”
i.e. “Speak the unpleasant truth”.

When I said that 90%
Indians are fools I said an unpleasant truth. The truth is that the minds of
90% Indians are full of casteism, communalism, and superstitions. Consider the
following:

1. When our people go to
vote in elections, 90% vote on the basis of caste or community, not the merits
of the candidate. That is why Phulan Devi, a known dacoit-cum-murderer was
elected to Parliament merely because she belonged to a backward caste which had
a large number of voters in that constituency. Vote banks in India are on caste
and community basis, which are manipulated by some unscrupulous politicians and
others.

2. 90% Indians believe in
astrology, which is pure superstition and humbug. Even a little commonsense
tells us that the movements of stars and planets has nothing to do with our
lives. Yet T.V. channels showing astrology have high T.R.P. ratings.

3. Cricket has been made
into a religion by our corporatized media, and most people lap it up like opium.
The real problems facing 80% people are socio-economic ---- poverty, massive
unemployment, malnourishment, price rise, health care, education, housing etc.
But the media sidelines or minimizes these real issues, and gives the
impression that the real issues are lives of film stars, fashion, cricket, etc.
When Rahul Dravid retired the media depicted it as a great misfortune for the
country, whereas when Sachin Tendulkar scored his 100th century it
was depicted as a great achievement for India. Day after day the media kept
harping on this, whereas the issues of a quarter million farmers suicides, and
47% Indian children being malnourished, was sidelined.

4. I had criticized the
media hype of Dev Anand’s death at a time when 47 farmers in India were
committing suicide on an average every day for the last 15 years. A section of
the media attacked me for doing so, but I reiterate that I see no justification
for the high publicity given by the media to this event for several days. In my
opinion, Dev Anand’s films transported the minds of poor people to a world of
make believe, e.g. a hill station where Dev Anand was romancing some girl. This
gave temporary relief for a couple of hours to the viewers from their lives of
drudgery. Such films, to my mind, serve no social purpose, but act instead like
a drug or alcohol to send the viewer temporarily from his miserable existence
to a beautiful world of tinsel.

5. In the recent Anna Hazare
agitation in Delhi the media hyped the event as a solution to the problem of
corruption. In reality it was, as Shakespeare said in Macbeth:

“A tale, told by an idiot

Full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing”

At that time if anyone had raised some logical questions he would have
been denounced as a ‘gaddaar’ or ‘deshdrohi’. The people who collected at
Jantar Mantar or the Ramlila ground displayed the mob mentality, which has been
accurately described by Shakespeare in ‘Julius Caesar’.

After Caesar’s murder
Mark Antony stirred up the Roman mob, which went around seeking revenge from
the conspirators. One of the conspirators was named Cinna. The mob caught hold
of another man, also named Cinna, who protested that he was Cinna the poet and
not Cinna the conspirator. Despite his protest the mob said “Hang him for his
bad verses” and lynched him.

The Janlokpal Bill, 2011 (whose full text is available online) defines an
act of corruption as an act punishable under Chapter IX of the Indian Penal
Code or under the Prevention of Corruption Act vide section 2(e). Section 6(a)
of the Bill says that the Lokpal will exercise superintendence over
investigation of acts of corruption, and section 6(c) empowers the Lokpal to
punish for acts of corruption after giving a hearing. Section 6(e) authorizes
the Lokpal to initiate prosecution and section 6(f) authorizes him to ensure
proper prosecution. Section 6(i)(j) authorize him to receive complaints.

Section 2 (c) of the Prevention of
Corruption Act define a public servant very widely. It includes not only
government servants but also a host of other categories e.g. an employee of a local body, Government
Corporation, judge, certain office bearers of some co-operative societies, officials
of Service Commission or Boards, Vice Chancellors and teachers in the
University, etc.

As pointed out by me in my article” Recreating Frankenstein’s Monster”
published in “Indian Express” on 31.3.2012 there are about 55 lac, (5.5
million) government employees in India (13 lac in Railways alone), and there
would be several lac persons of other categories coming within the definition
of public servant in the P.C Act. Obviously one person cannot supervise and
decide the lacs of complaints against them which would pour in. Hence thousands
of Lokpals, maybe 50,000 or more, will have to be appointed to deal with them.
They will have to be given salaries, housing, offices, staff, etc. And
considering the low level of morality prevailing in India, we can be fairly
certain that most of them will become blackmailers. It will be creating a
parallel bureaucracy, which at one stroke will double the corruption in the
country. And who will guard these Praetorian guards? A body of Super Lokpals ?

All this was not rationally analyzed and instead the hysterical mob that
gathered in Jantar Mantar or Ramlila ground in Delhi thought that corruption
will be ended by shouting “Bharat Mata ki Jai” and “Inquilab Zindabad”.

It
is time that Indians woke up to all this. When I call 90% of them fools my
intention was not to harm them, rather it was just the contrary. I want to see
Indians prosper, I want poverty and unemployment abolished, I want the standard
of living of the 80% poor Indians to rise so that they get decent lives.

But this is possible
when their mindset changes, when their minds are rid of casteism, communalism,
and superstitions, and instead they become scientific and modern.

By being modern I do not
mean wearing a nice suit or beautiful sari or skirt. Being modern means having
a modern mind, which means a rational mind, a logical mind a questioning mind,
a scientific mind. At one time India was
leading the whole world in science and technology (see my article ‘Sanskrit as
a language of Science’ on the website kgfindia.com). That was because our
scientific ancestors like Aryabhatta, Brahmagupta, Sushrut, Charak, etc
questioned everything. However, we subsequently took to the unscientific path
of superstitions and empty rituals, which has led us to disaster. Today we are
far behind the West in Science and Technology.

The worst thing in life
is poverty, and 80% of our people are poor. To abolish poverty we need to
spread the scientific outlook to every nook and corner of our country. It is
only then that India will shine. And until that happens the vast masses of our
people will continue to be taken for a ride.